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Notes -
Turning to some good news:
Article link
This is a WSJ article about the rise in justified homicides in the US in recent years. Much of it is about "Stand Your Ground Laws." I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the more lawyer-brained Mottizens on those kind of laws and their proliferation over the past decade or so.
On the culture war angle, this article is maybe the starkest example of "erosion of trust in society" that I've come across. A few of the anecdotes are pretty hair raising. They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad. The "road range" incident they cover in detail seems like it was unfortunate but when one guy levels a gun at another, there's only one reasonable reaction.
Violence must be tightly controlled for a society to function. This is something that's bone deep in humans. We've developed methods of conflict resolution that fall short of violence for our entire existence as a species. Even within the context of violence, there are various ways of controlling it. Duels and so forth. Even informal ones; basic Bro code dictates that when one guy falls down in a fight, the other one backs off.
But this article hints at the idea that people are zooming past any of that to full lethality. It's impossible to compile the stats to determine if that's actually the case or not, but the larger point remains; in a society with plunging basic trust, you're going to see levels of interpersonal violence spike. How should state laws governing violence respond to this? Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
Prime example of the worst argument in the world (non-central fallacy).
When someone says:
They imply murder, not very justified self-defence.
The article is absolutely rife with that kind of manipulative but technically accurate language. Just under the title
Technically true, but has the connotation that it's some "The Purge" shit that's going on.
They are indeed so called, but the phrasing implies that it's pretense.
This one is not even technically accurate: the laws are written to protect innocents who defend themselves. That they incentivize less than innocent people to claim they feared for their life is not the reason they were written. Unless the writer can prove otherwise.
What I expected from the title was actually vehicular manslaughter.
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They're the same picture. (Related: ever wonder why Demolition Man used the phrase 'murderdeathkill?')
There are some reasons you might see it that way, including but not limited to:
School zero tolerance policies are about lawsuit avoidance, not never believing the victim
Sure it is- if they believed the victim, and were correct in that assessment, then they need not fear a lawsuit.
Clearly, they do not want to do that. And if they aren't empowered to do so by broader society, well, that's already been covered by the preceding points (i.e. "they suspend a certain minority more, they suspend students of parents [who are also bullies] more, they don't want to do the work").
Also, the voting record of their personnel reveals they prefer candidates who don't see their inability/unwillingness to do their jobs as a problem.
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Even before zero tolerance, "it takes two to fight" was (and presumably is) the attitude of school principals and such. As a kid I tested that once, and found (to my lack of surprise) that not only does it take actually only take one willing person to fight, but that not fighting back won't prevent you from being suspended.
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